Chew Magna Fortress, UDK

Hey guys! I'm building an environment based off a scene from one of my favorite books, First King of Shannara by Terry Brooks. Basically, the characters are searching for a powerful relic called the Black Elfstone in an ancient fortress called the Chew Magna, hidden in a mountainous region. (Currently I am focusing on the exterior of this environment piece, but later I would like to get to some interior work and a specific courtyard scene I like). Here are the exact excerpts in case anyone is interested:

“A massive fortress stood before them, its stone blocks so ancient the edges were worn smooth and its surface so cracked it seemed as if spiderwebs had covered it over. It was a wondrous construction, a balancing of towers atop battlements, an interlinking of parapets that cantilevered forward and back at every turn, and a spiraling of catwalks that suggested the intricacy of tapestry threads woven on a loom. The castle rose high and then higher, until its farthest reaches were barely discernable. Mountains ringed the castle, opening to the sky through the ceiling of clouds and mist. Trees and scrub grew thick along the rock walls at higher elevations, branches and vines drooping inward toward the castle spires, letting daylight slip through in a ragged seam. It was from here that the light took its odd cast, spilling down through the filter of the leafy canopy and swirling haze to coat the fortress stone in its watery illumination.”

“Inch by inch, the mountains were reclaiming the ground on which the fortress had been built. One day they would close about it for good.”

“He glanced up again at the trees and scrub and vines growing high above them on the cliffs, and realized that the mist was almost a rain. He could feel the damp on his face. He looked at the fortress doors and windows, black holes in the gray haze. Iron hinges and locks hung empty and useless; the wood had rotted away at every turn. Moisture worked at the stone and mortar as well, wearing it down, eroding it. Tay walked to the wall of the nearest tower and rubbed his hand across the stone. The surface crumbled like sand under his fingers. This ancient keep, this Chew Magna, had the unpleasant feel of a place that would collapse under a strong wind.” (196)

Here is some of my reference and inspiration. I was specifically looking for examples of grand scale and the effects of erosion and age:

For textures, my goal is to push the level of detail and realism in my painting - my work is typically somewhat cartoony and simple and I would like to see if I can achieve something a little more involved/intricate this time. Here is a sort of guide I am going by, some textures I quite admire (cholden, lincolnhughes, romy, sayonara):

Using the written descriptions from the book, I painted a concept:

And now I am currently doing some basic blockout in max, making sure the fortress is structurally sound from all angles (currently I have some shapes right from the front):

This week I plan to complete the blockout. As well as develop some spreadsheets for the asset list I have assembled below (certainly subject to change):

1. What are decals?
2. How to texture blend in UDK
3. How to use vertex color in UDK, on models and on the Landscape
4. How to height-map blend in UDK

Currently I am debating whether to make the cliffs in this environment from custom meshes built in max (by extruding/building from a pre-painted texture plane, a horizontally tiling cliff face), or from sculpting in the UDK Landscape editor, where I imagine it might be easier to paint on some moss later (unless I figure out texture blending for custom meshes...). I'll be doing some tests tonight. Thoughts?

This first post is text-heavy - but more images to come, shortly! Critique and comments welcome, and thanks in advance:]

As far as the cliffs go, you need to remember that the landscape tool in UDK is heightmap based, so you can't undercut anything. Also, such extreme vertical changes will mean a lot of texture stretching.

chrisradsby - Awesome, thanks so much! ^_^ I will need to hunt down one of those rotating monitors now haha.

BARDLER - Yes, I will need to play with the FOV in UDK - just learned about that recently!

neverwander - Ahh, right. I do want a good deal of undercut going on in my cliffs, in fact, a general inward slant. To remedy the texture stretching, I was going to paint stepping in the terrain, point by point - but it's not like that would be easier than hand-modeling a custom mesh haha. Custom mesh it shall be!

This week I made my spreadsheets. Plant concepts and stuff! There is a variety of tall, mid-level, and ground-cover type plants, most of them the standard natural greens and browns, but some with little red accents that I want to use in my piece to complement the overall green-ish atmosphere and provide a hint of danger/foreboding. I'll end up picking 3 or 4 to model, perhaps more if time allows:

Critique and comments welcome. This next week will be dedicated to my castle model! I will complete the blockout and export it to UDK. Not necessarily fully detailed, but the overall layout and general shapes will be there and fitting together correctly.

I was perplexed by the Chew Magna thread title as I couldn't place what story it was from, but ah how could I forget Shannara, the series I stole my username from? Really keen to see how this goes, it's been awhile since I read the first king, but I do remember being intrigued by the Chew Magna section.

Looks good!
I'm curious about how you plan on tackling the large cracks in the stone of the castle. Do you plan on using tiling textures for everything, and defining the cracks with actual geometry, or were you planning on baking high poly onto low poly, or maybe even using decals?
Had you planned that out yet?

Thanks dirigible! I plan on using tiling textures for nearly everything (some parts of the castle may get unique texture space), but using decals for the cracks. I am only modeling out areas of huge damage, like where bricks are actually crumbling/missing. Not exaactly sure what decals are yet, but I'll be researching more about them soon :]

Also side note - changes I am still planning to make to the castle is a little bit of tapering/flaring of the towers cuz right now I think everything is still too straight even though I'm not going for a very cartoony look. Plus as some people of my friends have mentioned, I'll try to add some more asymmetry to the castle somehow so the silhouette is more interesting.

*sigh* So it's been a pretty frustrating week. I've been working on my first texture (the cliff texture) and I've probably started over like three or four times already trying to get something I like. Here's my latest iteration. Right now it kinda just looks like a wall or a floor or something too man-made at the moment. :poly127: I think I'm going to push this in a different direction and paint in some extruded shelves, and see if that works. Critique and comments welcome:

Definitely go with the painted shelves, but also try to think of the larger shapes in general. At the moment it definitely looks like purposefully-placed masonry that's cracked and eroded over time, but it doesn't have the hallmarks of something that should be on a vertical face.

Ask yourself what a cliff face might look like. What sort of strata is it constructed of? Which way are the layers of stone flowing? How is weathering and the shifting of the landscape affecting its shape? Is it sandstone, slate, granite? What would happen if you took a chisel to it  would it crack into a large sheet, or would small chunks come off?

Once you have those kinds of questions in mind, it's a lot easier to come up with the general look of the cliff face.

I mocked up a super quick example to give an idea of the direction you could go:

That looks like stone whose base is sinking into the earth and would come off the side of the cliff in large sheets. It used to be a flat or rounded upper surface, but now it's cracked and slowly being sucked down into the dirt as the tectonic plates and underground water sources erode the bedrock below it. It's something you'd more expect to see on a bit of a slope rather than a sheer cliff face, but it should give some idea of where you can go with your texture.

Ahh, thank you so much for the paintover and advice Swizzle. I'll think more critically about the cliff's construction and environment before diving in again, but I'm already starting to get a better idea of what to do. Thanks again for the time. Here we go again! :poly142:

So I redid my texture! Hopefully more cliff-like now:] Here's what it looks like on geometry. It's basically a bunch of little chunks clumped together, and if I hide some chunks I get different variations.

From here, I plan to do some FFD stuff to these and shove them into some taller, smoother cliff faces (probably need to make another texture for that). Also going to be painting a moss texture for texture blending in UDK. I'll be placing plants/shrubbery/grasses on some of the ledges too.

This is my first time tackling cliffs, so it's a challenge trying to come up with a workflow for something so immense! If anyone has any tips for me, I'm all ears:) Critique and comments welcome:

This week I'm gonna jump over to working on some smaller boulders and rocks, as well as a tree. There aren't any trees in my concept, but every outdoor environment needs trees, right? :P I'll find a place for them. Here's some reference for that: